


The Mirror Broke (But All My Friends Were Laughing)

by 23Murasaki



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hospitals, Magic, Summer of Giles 2020, the gang's all here and they're not dead!, which is to say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:40:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25531495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/23Murasaki/pseuds/23Murasaki
Summary: An unimportant man doesn't die in a London squat, and the Council never regains its prodigal son. Chaos never gains a degenerate one. Perhaps he wasn't — isn't — quite so unimportant after all.(Or: Absurdly self-indulgent Randall lives AU, because the author is emotionally invested in minor characters. A prequel, of sorts, tohow way leads on to way (I could not travel both), from SoG 2019.)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

Ripper knows two exorcisms and neither one has worked—Eyghon is still laughing at them from Randall’s body, mocking and taunting and not bleeding even though Randall’s beaten should-be-bloody and tied to a chair. Ripper’s throat is raw from yelling. 

“Ripper, _Ripper_ , listen—” Ethan’s hands close on his arm. He’s way too calm, he’s too calm, Ripper wants to wring his bloody neck because he’s guessing at spells instead of being upset, if he’s going to be useless he may as well be upset. 

“Piss off—” Ripper snaps. Diedre’s against a wall, staring so wide-eyed Ripper’s pretty sure she’s actually in shock. “Help, or piss off!”

“Helping!” Ethan insists. “I just— _listen to me_ —”

\-----

Ethan’s dumbshit idea doesn’t help, but one of the dozen and a half that follow does. It’s a blur, all of it, the rush of magic long since turned to pain, and Ripper doesn’t quite come back to himself until Randall is slumped limply in the chair and everything’s quiet. 

“I-is he…?” Tom whimpers from… somewhere. Diedre peels herself from the wall and touches Randall’s arm— feels for a pulse and then for breath in front of his broken nose. 

“He’s alive,” she says. “He’s—he’s not dead.” Her voice breaks with relief. “He’s not dead.” 

“Oh,” Ripper hears himself say, in a much higher voice than he usually tries to use. “That’s, er, that’s nice.”

“Is he him?” Ethan asks. No way to tell, is there? Not with how deeply Eyghon had buried, not with Randall unconscious and—

“He needs a hospital,” Ripper says. (Desperate times, these, desperate enough to risk the authorities. Better arrested than dead.) Philip animates. 

“Hospital. Right. We can… carry him?” That sounds stupid, but Ripper can’t quite work out why. 

“I’ll call an ambulance,” says Ethan flatly, and he turns on his heel and leaves. 

\-----

They don’t get arrested at the hospital, that’s something. The doctors ask too many questions and Ripper is too dazed to answer them properly and they have to take Randall to surgery, but no one gets arrested. 

\-----

Dazed isn’t quite the word for it. Ripper’s _terrified_ , the sort of terrified he hasn’t been since the Academy. (Watchers deal in certainties and the written word, after all, Ripper’s never practiced for might-have-beens and almosts, he knows what to do with a grave more than with a near miss.) Once Randall’s released (in a wheelchair, his arm in a sling, purple bruises disfiguring his face), Ripper pulls him aside for a stammered, miserable apology. Randall laughs at him. 

“What’re you sorry for, mate? Saving my life?” he asks. They both know full well what he’s sorry for, they both know full well that Eyghon was Ripper’s idea to start with. (His and Ethan’s, but there’s no one foolish enough to expect _Ethan_ to know better, Ethan’s all tricks and shallow charm and empty underneath.) “Have it on good authority you were the big damn hero.”

“No hero,” Ripper demurs. There’s something akin to a gentleman’s code for Randall and his people, vague a denomination as they may be. Ripper’s an outsider, so he doesn’t quite get it (and in Randall’s place, he thinks he’d want blood and revenge) but he’s grateful for it all the same. “You’d’ve done the same.”

“Well, yeah,” Randall says. “We’re friends, of course I’d’ve tried to save you.” His grin widens. “Tried, probably failed. Not as clever as you, am I?”

“Lucky we don’t have to test it,” Ripper blurts. _Lucky, lucky, lucky._ (Watchers don’t get lucky, Watchers don’t believe in luck, but standing in the dingy room with a man who should be dead of Ripper’s own foolishness, he believes in luck and chaos and knows he’ll never belong to the Council again.) 

\-----

It’s the rules, it’s the code that they should pick up where they left off, but rules are one thing and human beings are another. Diedre doesn’t sleep, Tom jumps at shadows, Philip (so long disinterested in any part of magic past the high) pores over spellbooks and notes. Ethan tries to cut the Mark from his arm with a penknife, to no effect (the shallow tattoo leaves a shadow that may go down to the bone, though Ripper disarms him before Ethan can cut that far). They’re as afraid as he is, Ripper realizes rather belatedly. They all know, they’ve all looked into the dark, and now they understand the — 

What? The foretold doom? That can’t be it, doom and prophecy seem far away while Randall is alive and recovering and laughing his own laugh, warm and sincere. 

Maybe what they understand now is monsters. 

“He played us for idiots, didn’t he?” Ethan asks, out of the blue. He’s perched on a makeshift stool, staring off into space and fiddling with his bandages. “Eyghon. I’ve been over it and over it, we didn’t do anything wrong.” Ripper opens his mouth to argue the point, but Ethan for once seems to not miss the moral boat. “With the spell, I meant. We followed the ritual exactly, same as always, because there wasn’t anything to do wrong. The flaw was starting it.” 

“But we’re okay now, luv,” Diedre says. “We’re—everything’s fine now.” She doesn’t sound sure. (She sounds as sure as Ripper feels, even though his dreams are the normal kind of nightmares now.)

“Sure,” Ethan says. “I just don’t… I don’t _like_ it.” Ripper scoffs aloud. 

“Don’t you? I’m floored.” 

“I don’t either,” says Randall. “But we know better now, right?” There are a few uncertain nods. 

“But just because _we_ do,” Ripper starts, “doesn’t mean other people—”

“It means we can _help_ ,” says Randall with finality. “Be the people who should’ve come for us.” (Rousing speech doesn’t look good on a man who looks like he was hit by a train.) Silence. 

“What,” Ethan drawls. “Save the world?”

“Nah. Help some people, maybe,” says Randall. “Think we could manage that, don’t you?” No, Ripper really doesn’t think so, Ripper thinks it’s dumb luck they’re not all dead (luck looks a lot dumber now that he has settled into it, now that his heart isn’t hammering staccato in his throat). 

“I think we should try,” he says, instead of saying all of that, because he’s lived through three apocalypses that he knows about but the world only felt like it was ending with a man tied to a chair in a London squat. (Funny, really, how the world can shrink to the size of a person, how the world can be defined by emotion. The Council’s probably lucky to be rid of him.) “I’m in.”

“Didn’t say I wasn’t,” Ethan snaps, but there’s a grin threatening to break onto his face (and he hasn’t smiled properly since that day, Ripper almost misses his smile). “Count me in for heroics, why not.”

“Me too,” says Diedre. “I’ll not let you lot guilt yourselves dead.”

“You’re all gonna die,” says Philip. “Just sayin’.” 

“Everyone dies eventually, mate,” says Tom with a shrug. “We can go out doing… something.”

“Defying prophecy,” Ripper says, too loudly. Ethan pretends to toast to that. 

“There we are, then,” says Randall. “Defying prophecy, one step at a time. I’d drink to it.”


	2. Chapter 2

It’s a goal of some sort, anyway, something to drag them out of the dread and the thinking. The world is too big, hell, even London is too big for there to be an identifiable starting point. People die every day, after all, unidentified bodies on roadsides and in ditches, corpses drained of blood on the underground, and it has been years since Ripper’s dared try to think of saving them. (It’s been years since he’s seen people who would be missed, a whole class of the academy’s best and brightest, slaughtered while the world kept turning.) He’d stopped looking or counting, that’s the thing, but now— Now he’s looking again, overaware and overtrained and with fingers that itch on the hilts of weapons. 

Watchers are trained for this, for the hunt and the kill and the risking of lives. Ripper’s friends are not. They’re not even trained for magic, really; what few actual abilities they have are either functionally useless in combat or just entirely untapped. So, of course, Diedre finds a vampire nest in one of the old Underground tunnels and goes running to Randall instead of doing literally anything else, and Randall tells Tom and Philip and they find Ethan along the way and by the time Ripper finds out they’re already in a tunnel with firebombs and he’s reading a note that keeps trying to fold itself back into a paper airplane and divebomb his head. 

He finds them later, singed and injured and victorious with the vampire nest reduced to ash, which is somehow infinitely better than he was expecting. Randall laughs and pulls him into a one-armed hug, mostly because his other arm is still in a cast and there are explicit instructions from a doctor about not overexerting himself. Ripper doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry so he makes a miserable choking noise and buries his face in Randall’s neck. 

“Hey, come on now,” says Dee, who is entirely too cheerful for a woman missing an eyebrow. “We got them!”

But they made it half-dead, really, because they aren’t fighters. Randall is built like a very large mailbox, sure, and Dee is vicious when she’s angry and Tommy sometimes has nigh-supernatural reflexes, but they’re neither made for this nor trained for this. Nothing to be done about the former, but Ripper at least can fix the latter.

It’s odd to call upon his old schooling all the way out here, like he’s summoning up memories of someone else—some Rupert Giles with a stammer and gelled-back curls and a closet full of identical uniforms—but they summon up without any trouble once he tries. Swordplay and defensive amulets and memorized tomes of what can kill what and how, a voice that slips into the wrong accent as he lectures—even that, the damn urge to lecture rather than explain, he knows lectures won’t land and will at best summon a chorus of questions he doesn’t know how to answer and had never thought to ask himself.

Still, they learn. Ethan giggles and innuendos his way through sparring practice, but when he thinks Ripper’s back is turned he plants his feet properly and flips Tommy over his shoulder with the sort of glee he usually reserves for questionable magic. Tommy, gentle thing that he normally is, doesn’t quite know how to retaliate but Ripper catches him practicing katas with the diligence of a Watcher trainee. Dee dangles amulets off of the pins on her favorite vest and takes to carrying stakes in her trouser pockets and talks too loudly about protecting ‘her boys’ while Phil acquires stacks upon stacks of notecards with bits of incantations—Arabic, Sumerian, Hebrew, Greek, Etruscan and Latin. (“It worked for learning French,” he says stiffly, and if Ripper finds himself flipping through some of the more obscure ones to keep himself sharp it’s no one’s business.)

\-----

The point is, they learn. It's bits and pieces at first, but they learn, and the hospital visits grow less frequent with time—more scrapes and bruises that can be tended to in-house, so to speak, fewer broken bones or cracked skulls. One of the doctors that had taken care of Randall seems to claim the lot of them as her own specific patients, or maybe she just drew the short straw. Either way, after the third time she pulls Ripper aside, hands him a slip of paper with a phone number, and instructs him to call her directly.

"Presuming you're not dead by then, with this sort of behavior," she adds. 

"We aren't thrill-seeking," Ripper tries to assure her, and she shakes her head.

"That's what they all say before they try to launch a motorbike off a bridge or something."

"Ooh, sounds fun!" says Ethan, too loud, even though he specifically has shown no desire to put himself into direct danger like that. Ripper cuffs him upside the head and the man topples theatrically, begging Dr. Patel to save him. She mutely hands him an ice pack and leaves the room. 

(The next time they're hospitalized, when a fyarl demon punts Phil through a wall, Ethan brings Dr. Patel a pot of half-blooming daffodils, because the way to win him over apparently is to not engage with his bullshit. For what it's worth, Phil's fine, though he gets a doctor's note saying he really shouldn't do whatever the hell they'd been doing.)

\-----

Fighting the forces of darkness really doesn't pay the bills. The Council has their own internal funds, of course, and Slayers are to be dependent upon their respective Watchers for the duration of their short lives (brutal as the concept sounds), but fighting the good fight on one's own is definitely a don't quit your day job situation. 

Only, well, none of them really have day jobs, do they? Ripper's own musical gigs are growing fewer and further between, not that they were ever particularly numerous, Phil's been living off a box of cash Ripper's pretty sure he stole from his parents, and the rest of them... well, at least Randall and Tommy have actual part-time jobs on occasion, while Dee fleeces tourists doing fortune telling on weekends (much harder to do with a split lip and an arm in a cast, to be sure), and the source of Ethan's random wads of cash and shiny trinkets is perhaps best filed under things man was not meant to know. And while all that had been enough to keep them in chips and beer and er, other substances on occasion, it does not cover regular expenditures like spell ingredients, medical treatment, weapons, repairs, and so forth, especially since things like prime gig time and prime vampire time rather overlap. 

The short version is that they're going kind of broke and Ethan's been cracking jokes about turning tricks a little too often when the girl knocks on their door. (She isn't just a girl—or rather, not to Ripper she's not, he knows her. In the general scheme of things, she's an ordinary person though, just another bright young thing that has drifted to Camden Town's counterculture and music.)

"Who—oh!" Ripper's eyes widen at the sight of her. "Olivia! What, um, what are you doing here?" The girl, Olivia, pulls her jacket tighter around her shoulders.

"All that talk about demons," she says quietly. "Is it true?"

"Well, um—" Ripper starts cautiously, but at least three voices yell affirmatives over his shoulder. "Sorry," he adds quickly, but Olivia gives a shaky nod. 

"People've been talking. They said you know how to, how to fix problems that are... like that." She takes a deep breath. "I think something's happened to my friend. I—I don't know how much you're supposed to pay for this sort of thing, but please, if you can help her..."

"Of course," says Ripper, quicker this time so that no one interrupts him. "We'll do whatever we can."

\-----

Exorcisms are easier with practice and even easier with preparation. That doesn't make them easy, by any means, and Ripper adds this to the list of nightmares he's going to repeatedly have, but they do it right. The demon possessing Ella Collins is trapped in a specially prepared wooden box, and the girl sinks to her knees exhausted, dehydrated, but free. Olivia tries to pay them, which Ripper tries to gallantly refuse, then Collins's mother (who'd inserted herself into the operation a few hours in out of very legitimate concern for her child) intervenes and insists on paying. There is no price, she says, for her daughter's life, but there is such a thing as a reasonable reward. 

(A reasonable reward, in this case, is more money than Randall's seen in one place in his life. It's an outlier, in terms of payments, but it's the first one that breaks the dam.) 

\-----

"I know you," says a man in a bar when Ripper's finishing up his first set in four months. "You're with those guys that saved that girl. Ellie."

"Er, maybe?" says Ripper. 

"From a demon," says the man, grinning. "You're demon hunters, innit?"

"I suppose," says Ripper. The description sounds odd. "I—we're trying to help people."

"Sure. By hunting demons." Well, he's not wrong exactly, so Ripper shrugs. "I've got a job for you. What's the going rate?"

\-----

Eventually they rent an office, because no matter how many times one tries to fix the floors and walls and doors their home base is undeniably a squat and even Tommy thinks it gives a bad impression to meet clients there. (Also they’re closer to thirty than they are to twenty, now, and chairs with backs and beds instead of sleeping bags seem almost tempting. Also they need somewhere to store all the weapons and books, and maybe a proper laboratory for Ethan because he’s getting a bit too old to be blowing up kitchens.) It’s odd, trying to remember a signature so many years later, but eventually Ripper scrawls RUPERT GILES across the relevant bits paperwork for what he hopes is the last time in his life, Phil signs off on his bits, money changes hands, and the office is theirs. (It has to be them, after all. Randall and Ethan barely exist, legally speaking, they belong to the underworld more than to the human one, and Tommy has a criminal record as long as his lanky legs and Dee’s been unofficially declared dead.)

“Are we real people now?” Ethan asks, perched cross-legged on a desk. “Does this make us, um, legitimate?”

“You’re not legitimate, don’t worry,” says Dee with a laugh, but they put up a sign (“Questions Answered, Problems Solved”) and Phil vanishes for three hours and comes back with business cards for all of them so the assurance may have been in vain. 

Business triples, though, and Ripper stops even thinking about pawning his records for cash. 

\-----

They’re barely back from an incident in France when the Watcher knocks at their door. He’s very young, for a Watcher, probably still an academy student, and he’s wearing a plain white t-shirt (impeccable) and jeans (ironed), but he could as well have Property of the Watchers’ Council stamped across his forehead. 

“The hell does the Council want?” Ripper asks, and the boy retreats several steps. (By now Ripper casts a rather frightening figure—he’s always been tall, but time in what Watchers term the field has let him fill out muscle structure, and he’s always armed and wears steel-toed boots and bears the scars that are sort of inevitable with this life, including one brutal-looking one that runs from his ear down his jaw and neck and is not in the least obscured by his beard. There are stories about that scar, each more outlandish than the last.) 

“Not, um, not the Council,” the boy stammers out. “Th-that is, I’m not here in um, in an official capacity.” He pauses and fidgets with his glasses. “Are you the one called Ripper GIles?”

“Yes, and who are you?” (He was someone else before, but he’s only Ripper now—now and forever.)

“Um,” says the boy again. “I’m—my name is Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. I think we need your help.”

\-----

They run the Cult of the Brilliant Ones to ground in a country estate, because what Wesley Wyndam-Pryce thinks is an example of odd behavior in his schoolmates runs altogether deeper and worse. The whole matter culminates in a literal firefight and Ripper charging into battle on horseback (some skills don’t rust with time) and ends with stiff gratitude expressed by Watchers who look at him and his friends as if they’re monsters. 

But it doesn’t matter, because people whom he found imposing years ago look fragile and old now, so he digs a non-singed business card out of his pocket and offers it, with his best air of cold politeness, to Roger Wyndam-Pryce. 

“Do call us if you have any other problems you can’t solve,” he says, and he knows it hurts like a blow. 

“You will never be welcome,” says Wyndam-Pryce, low and cold. “Take a look, because this world will never be yours.”

“I wouldn’t want it,” says Ripper, and he means it sincerely. It’s 1987 and the sun shines on rolling green fields, and Ripper turns his back and goes home. His friends—his family go with him, and not a one of them looks back. 

\-----

(Of course, there’s a great deal else afoot, both that day and before and after. Some people live, some people die, some apocalyptic schemes are foiled and so are some perfectly ordinary ones. Ethan buries himself in research on spells; he’ll never have Ripper’s sheer power, but Ripper will never have his innate curiosity and penchant for creative forms of destruction. If strange things whisper to him in the dark, if he dreams the streets of the Dreamers’ City and feels the pull of an ancient and primal chaos, there’s always someone there to turn him back away from all of that. Predispositions, after all, are only that, and Ethan loves his friends, loves them even more than he loves magic. That’s something he’s learned. He doesn’t turn his back on a possible destiny quite as dramatically as Ripper does, of course, but he turns just the same, and that counts for something in the grand scheme of things. 

It’s 1997 when Eyghon makes a second attempt, and instead of finding its former victims finds a sorcerer standing on a crossroads with a crystal trap. Ethan’s friends won’t ever know, because it doesn’t do to brag about serious things. Besides, they have their eyes set on a Hellmouth, why would they want to hear anything else?)


End file.
